Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions [electronic resource] /
Bristow, Joseph.editor.
McDonagh, Josephine.editor.
This book takes a fresh look at the progressive interventions of writers in the nineteenth century. From Cobbett to Dickens and George Eliot, and including a host of lesser known figures – popular novelists, poets, journalists, political activists – writers shared a commitment to exploring the potential of literature as a medium in which to imagine new and better worlds. The essays in this volume ask how we should understand these interventions and what are their legacies in the twentieth and twenty first centuries? Inspired by the work of the radical literary scholar, the late Sally Ledger, this volume provides a commentary on the political traditions that underpin the literature of this complex period, and examines the interpretive methods that are needed to understand them. This timely book contributes to our appreciation of the radical traditions that underpin our literary past.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
List of Figures -- Preface and Acknowledgements -- Contributors -- Introduction; Joseph Bristow and Josephine McDonagh -- 1. No Laughing Matter: Chartism and the Limits of Satire; Mike Sanders -- 2. ‘Their Deadly Longing’: Paternalism, the Past, and Perversion in Barnaby Rudge; Ben Winyard -- 3. Frederick William Robinson, Charles Dickens, and the Literary Tradition of ‘Low Life’; Anne Schwan -- 4. Remembering Radicalism on the Midlands Turnpike: George Eliot, Felix Holt, and William Cobbett; Ruth Livesey -- 5. The Commune in Exile: Urban Insurrection and the Production of International Space; Scott McCracken -- 6. Divorce and the New Woman; Anne Humphreys -- 7. Revolutions in Journalism: W. T. Stead, Indexing, and ‘Searching’; Laurel Brake -- 8. Towards a Perlocutionary Poetics?; Isobel Armstrong -- Sally Ledger: A Chronological Bibliography -- Bibliography -- Index.-.
This book takes a fresh look at the progressive interventions of writers in the nineteenth century. From Cobbett to Dickens and George Eliot, and including a host of lesser known figures – popular novelists, poets, journalists, political activists – writers shared a commitment to exploring the potential of literature as a medium in which to imagine new and better worlds. The essays in this volume ask how we should understand these interventions and what are their legacies in the twentieth and twenty first centuries? Inspired by the work of the radical literary scholar, the late Sally Ledger, this volume provides a commentary on the political traditions that underpin the literature of this complex period, and examines the interpretive methods that are needed to understand them. This timely book contributes to our appreciation of the radical traditions that underpin our literary past.
Literature, Modern—19th century.
British literature.
Fiction.
Literature—History and criticism.
Nineteenth-Century Literature.
British and Irish Literature.
Fiction.
Literary History.